Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, USA-based newspaper published on the Internet
Agbedo, Professor of Linguistics, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, is a contributing analyst to USAfrica multimedia networks.
In Nigeria’s turbulent political theatre, where facts are routinely flattened by propaganda and truth is stretched on the rack of partisan convenience, it is often the metaphor – sharp, elusive, ancestral – that restores depth to discourse. That is the terrain where my senior schoolmate and colleague, Dr. Samuel Ugwuoti does his finest works. I have christened those Samuelpeadic Ugwuotianica.
His recent 2026 WhatsApp commentary on Peter Obi is vintage Samuelpeadic: compressed, coded, mischievous, and devastating in implication.
In a few lines, he resurrects the haunting imagery of Eneke, the proverbial bird immortalized in the works of Chinua Achebe – that restless, adaptive creature, who learned to fly without perching because hunters had learned to shoot without missing. In that single allusion, Samuel performs what many verbose commentaries fail to achieve. He maps a complex political trajectory onto a cultural archetype that is instantly intelligible, historically rooted, and philosophically resonant.
But Samuel does not stop at Eneke. He extends the metaphor into darker, almost ritualistic terrain: the native doctor, goatskin bag in hand, surgical blades glinting, camwood ointment ready – only to discover that the baby he was commissioned to circumcise has died before dawn. It is a macabre closure. The ritual is aborted. The enterprise collapses. The agents of design are rendered redundant. “Poor dm!” he concludes, with a shrug that is at once ironic and accusatory.
This is not mere banter. It is discourse as diagnosis.
To understand the depth of this intervention, one must return briefly to the Eneke mythos. In Achebean cosmology, Eneke is not just a bird; it is a principle of survival in hostile environments. When the conditions of existence become lethal, adaptation becomes imperative. Flight becomes strategy. Evasion becomes intelligence. Eneke does not confront the hunter; it outwits him. It rewrites the grammar of engagement.
It is precisely this grammar that Samuelpeadic deploys to interpret the political peregrinations of Peter Obi. Since his meteoric rise in the 2023 elections under the Labour Party banner, Obi has occupied a peculiar position in Nigeria’s political imagination: at once insider and outsider, establishment and insurgent, target and threat. His movement unsettled entrenched power structures, not merely because of electoral arithmetic, but because of the symbolic capital he mobilized, a new vocabulary of accountability, frugality, and technocratic promise.
Yet, as Samuel’s metaphor suggests, the hunters did not remain idle. If Obi became Eneke, it is because “men learned shooting without missing.” The system – call it the ruling establishment, the deep state, or the diffuse network of political interests – adapted in response. Within the Labour Party, figures emerged, almost theatrically, to generate internal discord: Abure, Apapa, Arabambi. Whether by coincidence or design, the party became a theatre of fragmentation. The message was clear: if you cannot shoot the bird mid-air, poison the tree it might perch on.
Obi’s exit to the ADC was thus less a retreat than a tactical flight – Eneke shifting altitude. For a moment, the skies cleared. The Labour Party fell eerily silent, as though the storm had passed. But the calm was deceptive. Soon enough, ADC itself began to crackle with the familiar electricity of engineered chaos. New actors – Nafiu, Abejide – entered the stage, brandishing the same script: scatter, destabilize, disorient. At this point, Samuelpeadic’s narrative acquires prophetic cadence. Eneke, sensing the tightening net, takes flight again. Obi exits ADC, casting his gaze toward the NDC. The pattern repeats with almost ritualistic precision: emergence, disruption, migration. It is a choreography of pursuit and evasion, a political cat-and-mouse game in which the mouse has learned to fly.
But what is at stake here is not merely the biography of a politician. It is the anatomy of a system that thrives on fragmentation. Samuel’s closing image – the aborted circumcision – captures this with chilling clarity. The native doctor, with his instruments of incision and ritual transformation, represents the agents of political engineering: those who slice parties into factions, who anoint and disanoint leaders, who deploy conflict as a tool of control. Yet, in Samuel’s telling, their enterprise fails, not because they lack skill, but because their object has vanished. The “baby” is gone. The ritual has no subject. This is where the metaphor turns subversive. If Obi is Eneke, then the system’s strategies – its blades and ointments – are rendered impotent by his refusal to remain fixed within a single institutional frame. Mobility becomes resistance. Fluidity becomes power. The hunters are left performing rituals on empty air.
Of course, one must resist the temptation to romanticize this endlessly. Flight, after all, is not a solution; it is a strategy. It buys time. It preserves viability. But it does not, in itself, resolve the structural contradictions of Nigerian politics. Indeed, one might ask: how long can Eneke remain airborne? At what point does perpetual flight become exhaustion? And what happens when the sky itself becomes contested terrain? These are questions that Samuelpeadic, in his characteristic economy, leaves hanging. His role is not to provide answers, but to provoke thought, to unsettle complacency, to force a re-reading of familiar events through unfamiliar lenses.
It is in this sense that I celebrate him, not merely as a friend or senior schoolmate, but as a practitioner of what might be called linguistic insurgency. From our shared beginnings at Premier Secondary School, Ukehe – perched on the serene Ikpogwu hills, where the wind itself seemed to carry fragments of forgotten proverbs – to our reunion at the Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Samuel has remained consistent in one regard: his refusal to treat language as a neutral instrument. For him, words are weapons, but also bridges. They wound, but they also weave. They connect dots and verses on the vast, often chaotic canvas of society. In an age where public discourse is increasingly flattened by cliché and polluted by noise, Samuelpeadic insists on density, on meaning that must be unpacked, decoded, savored.
His sobriquet, which I coined in playful admiration – Samuelpeadic Ugwuotianica, a parody of Encyclopaedia Britannica – is not an exaggeration. It is an acknowledgment of his capacious mind, his ability to draw from history, literature, economics, sports, philosophy, and folklore to illuminate the present. He does not merely comment on events; he situates them within a broader epistemic framework, reminding us that nothing in Nigeria’s political theatre is entirely new. The scripts may change, the actors may rotate, but the underlying structures persist. And yet, within this persistence, there are moments of rupture, moments when new meanings emerge, when old metaphors acquire fresh urgency. Samuel’s invocation of Eneke is one such moment. It compels us to rethink not only Obi’s political trajectory, but the very logic of political survival in Nigeria.
Is adaptation enough? Can flight substitute for confrontation? Or does Eneke, at some point, need to transform into a different kind of creature, one that does not merely evade the hunter, but dismantles the conditions that produce hunters in the first place? These are not questions with easy answers. But they 
are questions worth asking. And it is to Samuelpeadic’s credit that he poses them without didacticism, without the heavy-handedness that often characterizes political commentary. He trusts the intelligence of his audience. He invites interpretation. He leaves room for ambiguity. In doing so, he exemplifies a tradition that is deeply rooted in African oral culture: the art of saying much with little, of encoding critique within narrative, of using humour as a vehicle for serious reflection. His closing “Poor dm!” is not merely a throwaway line; it is a subtle indictment of those who, in their zeal to control outcomes, fail to anticipate the unpredictability of human agency.
As for me, I remain, as always, both student and co-traveler in this linguistic journey. If my own modest attempts at editorializing, my efforts to insist that “words matter in connecting dots and verses on the canvas of society,” carry any resonance, it is in no small measure due to the inspiration I draw from minds like Samuel’s. In the end, perhaps that is the true significance of this piece. It is not merely about Eneke or Obi or the shifting alliances of Nigerian politics. It is about the enduring power of language to make sense of complexity, to reveal patterns where others see chaos, to challenge narratives that seek to simplify what is inherently intricate.
Eneke will continue to fly. The hunters will continue to learn. The native doctors will continue to sharpen their blades. But as long as there are voices like Samuelpedic’s, voices that refuse to be dulled, that insist on precision, that revel in the richness of metaphor, there will also be a counter-current: a space where meaning is contested, where narratives are interrogated, where the dance between word and world remains alive. And in that space, we find not just commentary, but clarity. Not just critique, but consciousness. Not just language, but life.
